Episode 1: The Pink Bandana Moment

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In this first episode, we hear about a “pink bandana moment” – a gender-based assumption – that had an impact on our host’s life.

In 1983, Annie played on a boys’ basketball team and, rather than getting playing time, she and a fellow female player received gifts from their coach – pink bandanas. For a tomboy amidst a self-imposed decades-long ban on anything pink, this gift was not well received. Instead, our host saw this as a reminder that she was a girl athlete, not just an athlete. The teenage mini-rage eventually subsided, but the desire to reduce the pain of those pink bandana moments did not.

The result of the basketball #PinkBandanaMoment was frustration and anger, while it could have opened up an opportunity for a conversation and, ultimately, understanding. Building on this experience, and a few decades of seeing pink bandana moments play out in the workplace, Unraveling Pink was launched to reduce the number of #PinkBandanaMoments that happen in our workplaces. Unraveling Pink invites female and male guests to share gender-based assumptions in their lives that perhaps could have played out better, and to explore how those situations could have been handled to result in more constructive outcomes. Through conversation across genders, we can reduce the number of incorrect assumptions that happen and perhaps even get to know each other better.

Please join us on this journey. It is not a forum to complain about the other gender, but to open up a constructive dialog and collectively find better solutions than to assume. You can participate by: